Text Analysis Methods Grad Workshop

This is a script for a workshop on using Voyant and TAPoR for a graduate class on research methods.

1.0 Introduction

Overview
This workshop will quickly introduce you to computer assisted text analysis using Voyant and TAPoR. Voyant is currently a beta release by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell and is the next generation in a series of text analysis tools that include HyperPo and TAPoRware. TAPoR is web site for the discovery and review of text analysis tools including those in Voyant.

Outline
In this workshop we will:

First, look at how to use a single Voyant tool, Cirrus, with different texts.

Then learn how to use the normal skin of Voyant with a single text and then a corpus.

Then learn how to load your own text into Voyant.

Finally, we will look at TAPoR where you can find other tools.

Help
Remember that the tools entered in TAPoR like Voyant are research tools and will often fail, especially when a whole group of people use it at once. There are multiple versions up if one server is down. If you need help, connect to Hermeneuti.ca and explore the resources there. Here are some useful links:

a much older version of Voyant, more of a tourist attraction and last ditch solution

2.0 Preparing a text for a question

The first step in text analysis is to assemble a text to fit your question(s). What do you want to ask about? What sort of text would help you ask questions about an issue? How can you use the internet to build a text?

For this workshop lets assemble a text off the internet.

Decide on some aspect of popular culture or computing culture well documented on the internet.

Google keywords associated with the subject you want to study.

Skim the results and then develop selection criteria for what you want to scrape.

Scrape a set of texts using Google.

Copy and paste the texts into a text file. Clean out the navigation information and irrelevant parts.

The Cirrus tool shows you a word cloud of high frequency words. Some questions to ask yourself:

What words did you expect? What words are missing? What words are interesting.

How does the tool arrange words and choose colours? Is there any correspondence between size and frequency?

Try It: Try clicking on a word. It will launch a second tab or window with the full Voyant reading environment. That’s what we will look at next.

Try It: Now try other tools in Voyant. Go to http://docs.voyant-tools.org/tools and experiment with the tools. Warning some of them are prototypes that won’t work that well. Try your text in different tools.

4.0 Using a Reading Skin

Voyant Tools can also be composed into “skins” that combine tools as panels so that they can be used interactively. Here is the same Frankenstein text and an Austen corpus in a simple skin: